“After building a significant business around making push messages easier to use, Urban Airship is now aiming to do the same with Apple’s Passbook with the acquisition of Tello,” Devindra Hardawar reports for VentureBeat.

“The small startup has developed PassTools, a visual editor for Apple’s Passbook that lets anyone create passes without dealing with complicated code. Think of it like those simple webpage creators that made it possible to create a site without the headache of HTML. For Urban Airship, it’s an early play on a potentially explosive new market of mobile publishers,” Hardawar reports. “‘Passbook allows companies to have a mobile presence without building an app and having consumers download it. … Now they can just build a pass,’ said Urban Airship chief marketing officer Brent Heiggelke in an interview with VentureBeat. ‘We think this is very complementary [with push messaging].'”

Hardawar reports, “Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s Palo Alto offices, which will give it a Silicon Valley base in addition to its San Francisco office and Portland, Ore. headquarters. All of Tello’s employees will move over to Urban Airship’s new Digital Wallet group, which Tello chief executive Joe Beninato will head up.”